Wednesday, March 29, 2017

What blacks activists who try to block views of Dana
Schutz’s “Open Casket", demanding the artist destroy it, don't understand
is that this high-handed approach diminishes the appeal of what's right about
Black Lives Matter, and that of the whole movement against racism.

It sows doubt.

Came across it in myself today when reading about protests
of a police shooting of a black guy. For a second, a split second, I hesitated
as I asked myself: are these protestors the same people who want to forbid me
from seeing a painting, who think it should be destroyed?

If so. . .

I got over it. I know where I stand about police murders.

But to reiterate, the protestors who stand in front of Dana
Schutz’s “Open Casket" don't have any idea of the damage they're doing.

Excellent arguments have been mounted against this act of
would-be censorship but the one I haven't heard is the one I'm making here:
it's a real turn-off, encouraging sympathizers, of whatever race, not to care,
not to trust, to think twice, and maybe turn away.

Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Frank Rich no longer occupies the central outpost at the NY
Times that was his during the Bush years — so, for example, Mel Gibson is no
longer liable to threaten, "I want his intestines on a stick . . . I want
to kill his dog" – but the pieces he writes for nymag are no less pointed.
I, for one, look forward to them.

In his latest, he challenges what he sees as a disabling
conceit among liberals as they contend with Trump's victory. If only, they
winge, they had managed to cross the "empathy gap" and make nice to
the white working class and rural poor, we would have avoided the calamity of
Trump. But Rich thinks there's little reason to believe anything would have
gotten through to the "Trumpentariat".

Monday, March 27, 2017

Fascinating piece showing that the attention the settler
movement in Israel gets is vastly disproportionate to its actual success on the
ground. For example, in 1981, the Likud "projected that by 2010, 1.3
million Jews would live alongside 1.8 million Arabs in the West Bank. In fact,
among the close to three million West Bank Palestinians, just 405,158 Jewish
settlers resided in 126 settlements in mid-2016, comprising 13.8 percent of the
region's population. . . Not even the serious housing crisis within Israel
serves to push more Jews into the heavily subsidized settlements."

Sunday, March 19, 2017

Jimmy Breslin died on Saturday, 3/19/17, age 88. He
represented some of the best features of print journalism in its heyday when he
plied that trade for a variety of outlets — the NY Post before it became a
Murdoch rag, the NY Daily News, among them.

Breslin was born, raised and bloodied in New York, and it's
next to impossible to imagine him transplanted to another venue. He liked
fights and the kind NYC offered — and by NYC I don't mean only the high rent
districts of Manhattan, though he had access, but as much or more the places in
Queens he knew well.

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

The following is from Richard Hofstadter's "Anti-intellectualism
in American Life":

"The McCarthyist fellow travelers who announced that
they approved of the senator's goals even though they disapproved of his
methods missed the point: to McCarthy's true believers what was really
appealing about him were his methods, since his goals were always utterly nebulous.
To them, his proliferating multiple accusations were a positive good, because
they widened the net of suspicion and enabled it to catch many victims who were
no longer, or had never been, Communists; his bullying was welcomed because it satisfied
a craving for revenge and a desire to discredit the type of leadership the New
Deal had made prominent. . . "

Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Timothy Snyder is an historian best known for
his "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin" (2010), and for conversations
with the late Tony Judt, collected in "Thinking the Twentieth Century"
(2012).

The following are quotes from an interview with Snyder** in which he
brings his vast knowledge of twentieth century authoritarian transformations to
bear on conditions in the United States today.

Tuesday, March 7, 2017

Is Trump a fascist, or, more vaguely, fascistic? Let me
suggest that we lay this one to rest. No doubt that he's fascist/fascistic.

He's mobilized extreme xenophobia and nativism, violence,
racism, in the service of strongman rule and as against traditions of due
process and civil liberties. Trump's managed to subvert the distinction between
truth and lies, and not in any cool subtle postmodern way, either. No, history
will show that Stump owes more to Joseph Goebbels than to Marcel Duchamp.

Friday, March 3, 2017

Someone had to say this, and though Charley Pierce is hardly
the only one to do so, it can't be denied that he puts it so very well:

A while back, I ran out of patience with the endless
provision of cookies to the people who looked at the United States of America
and decided that just what we needed was to have it run for a while by a
Manhattan real-estate grifter and career public nuisance because he was going
to bring jobs and money back to a bunch of states he very likely couldn't find on
a map.

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

I don't mean to tax people with heavy reading but since I do
like to send material around that I find of interest I thought this more than qualified.
To read or not to read: it's on you. In any case, it's Edward Rothstein's
critique of "Jerusalem
1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven," the much-touted show
currently at the Metropolitan Museum.